AnimLayer — animation layers for Blender

Work the way animators in every other package do: build a performance in passes. A base layer for the body mechanics, an additive layer for the overlap, another for the polish — each one adjustable, mutable and reversible on its own, without ever touching the layer underneath.

What it solves

Blender has no animation layers. The official ones have been on the roadmap for years and keep slipping. What Blender does have is the NLA editor, which can do the job but asks you to understand tracks, strips, blend modes, extrapolation and tweak mode before you can add a single overlap pass. Most animators try it once and go back to duplicating actions and hoping.

AnimLayer is the layer panel that should sit on top of it. Add a layer, key into it, drag a weight slider. The NLA is still doing the work underneath, and you never have to look at it.

How it works

• Start Layering takes the animation you already have and makes it the bottom layer. Nothing is copied, converted or lost.
• Add Layer puts an empty pass on top and starts editing it, so the very next key you set lands in the new layer.
• Key normally. What you dial in is what you see — the layer stores the difference for you, so a value of 20 degrees means the character ends up at 20 degrees, not 20 on top of whatever was there.
• Weight mixes each layer in from 0 to 1. Keyframe it and the whole layer fades in and out over time.
• Solo and mute to hear one pass on its own, or take it out of the mix while you work.
• Reorder, duplicate, delete layers from the same list.

Reuse a pass instead of redoing it

• Layer From Pose works in the order the job actually happens: pose first, keep it afterwards. Push the shoulder until the shot reads, press one button, and the push becomes an additive layer keyed at the current frame. Only the bones you moved, only the channels you changed.
• Mirror Layer flips a pass to the other side of a symmetric rig — animate one arm, mirror it, keep both sides adjustable. Bones are paired by their side names and the values are flipped with the same convention Blender's own flipped pose paste uses.
• Copy To Rig sends a finished layer to a second character, bones matched by name, timing and weight intact. Anything the other rig does not have is named in the report rather than carried across to animate nothing.

A fix that applies to one shot only

Limit To Range switches a layer off outside two frames, so a correction made for one shot stops affecting the rest of the take. Fade In And Out does the same with a ramp at each end, for handing over between two passes without a pop.

Neither deletes a keyframe. The limit is the layer's weight over time, so it can be moved, widened or lifted at any point and the pass underneath is untouched. A limited layer still merges exactly — the fade is baked in frame by frame.

Merging that is actually exact

Merge Down combines a layer with the one below it. Flatten All collapses the whole stack into one. Both resample the curves frame by frame and add them, so the pose after merging is identical to the pose before it — not close, identical. That includes layers whose keys sit on completely different frames, and layers you have turned down to a partial weight.

Where an exact merge is not possible — an Override layer hides the layers beneath it channel by channel — it says so and tells you what to do instead, rather than producing something almost right that you would discover was wrong three hours later.

Nothing is locked in

A layer is an ordinary NLA track holding one strip. There is no private format and no hidden database. That means an NLA stack you built by hand shows up as layers the moment you open the panel, your file still opens correctly in plain Blender, and if you ever uninstall the add-on your animation is exactly where it always was.

Details that matter in production

• Lock a layer to protect a finished pass from being edited or merged by accident.
• Deleting a layer asks first — it throws away animation, so it does not happen on a stray click.
• Empty layers are labelled so you know at a glance which passes you have not keyed yet.
• Works on anything animated — armatures, objects, cameras, lights.

Tested, not assumed

212 automated checks run in a clean Blender against every release, on a real armature rather than a toy object. Every merge is verified by sampling the pose of every bone across the timeline before and after and requiring an exact match. The weight slider, solo, mute, reordering and layer editing are each verified by reading the pose Blender actually produces, not by inspecting the data and assuming.

The reuse tools are held to the same bar. A mirrored layer has to play the exact flip of the original at every sampled frame; a layer copied to a second rig has to reproduce the source pose exactly; a faded layer has to sit at precisely half strength halfway through its fade, and to merge with no change in the pose from end to end.

Requirements

Blender 4.2 LTS or newer. Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux. No dependencies, no downloads, works offline.